Wednesday, March 05, 2014

In
the video River Voices (2002), senior
Portsmouth residents who had lived through the 1937 Flood shared their
recollections and reflections of what was
up to that time the country’s worst flood. Portsmouth is located in the Bible Belt, a geographical fact that is reflected in River Voices. Two major events in particular in the bible
influenced River Voices, the first of which was the Great Flood and the second of which was
the coming of Christ. God’s main purpose in the Great Flood was to drown
the wicked descendants of Adam and Eve
and start over again with the righteous Noah and his family. But that plan didn’t
work out, so God sent his son
Jesus Christ who offered sinful humanity redemption by his sacrifice on the
cross. Those who accepted Jesus as their savior were ipso fact saved.

In the narrative of redemption in River Voices, the savior of the 1937 Flood was not a male but a female, and not a white but a
black female. In “The Great Ohio River
Flood” (2005), an informative scholarly paper that is available at the Shawnee State
library and online (click here). Lisa M.
Pasquinelli (now Lisa P. Rickey) pointed out that there was a white male, Everett Conley, who drowned
in the ’37 Flood. He happened to be about the same age as Jesus, but no one thought of him as a savior, probably because there was no place for him in a
narrative of redemption, no place for him in River Voices, or anywhere else. Conley had not been
trying to rescue someone from drowning; he was rather trying to win a bet that he could swim two hundred yards in
the flood with his clothes on. It is
hard to imagine anyone making that foolish bet sober.Sober or not, Conley was not qualified to serve as the savior in the narrative
of redemption, but Bessie Tomlin was. She ended up in the water with her clothes on but
not to win a bet. She was in the water because the rowboat that was transferring her from the
Washington School to the Lincoln School
had capsized. There was no doubt about
the location of the capsizing—it was at the
corner of 11th and Waller, but there was doubt about why the boat capsized. The explanation that came down to us is that
Tomlin, after having been splashed by water from a wave, had stood up in a panic, causing the boat to tip over.

The Wave: Deus Ex Machina

About
that wave. The weather during the flood was
not stormy and the water was not surging. The weather had been unseasonably warm
and rainy all winter. The weather remained calm throughout the flood. The many photos
taken during the flood show water flowing everywhere but no turbulence, no waves. Before the river could
surge over the floodwall, wreaking havoc
on life and property, city engineers had
opened the valves of at least six sewers
so that river water would flow smoothly
and gradually into the city. They were trying as much as possible to make
it a controlled flood. It is possible that water splashed on Tomlin, there was so much of it
around, but it seems rather unlikely that it would have been from a wave. The
wave may have been the deus ex machina
of the narrative of redemption, the thing that explained the capsizing of the
boat and the drowning of Tomlin. After the boat capsized, the fireman Walter
Chick who was in charge and who
presumably had been doing the rowing, either
quickly righted the boat or was rescued by another boat. In either case, he would have been soaking wet. It was
7 PM, on January 25th, so it was
already dark (this was before daylight saving time), making everything and everyone harder to see. This crucial
episode in the narrative of redemption took place figuratively as well as
literally in the dark. In his depiction of Tomlin handing Alberta up to Chick (shown above), Dafford, heightening the drama,depicted the water at the time of Tomlin’s drowning as tempestuous, but it was the artist, we might say, not nature, making waves. Dafford also depicts Chick as dry, as if he had not been in the water. In the central panel of the flood mural (shown below), painted from a photo, there are no waves. Flooded Portsmouth looks in the central panel as calm as a canal in Venice.

Flooded Portsmouth, looking in central panel as calm as a canal in Venice

After handing Alberta up to Chick, Tomlin is reported to have cried, “Save my baby! Save my baby!” Then she disappeared under the water. Because
of her sacrifice, she was eventually transformed into a Christ figure but not just because she had saved her daughter but also because she
saved the city, spiritually speaking. She
set the example of self-sacrifice for all the residents of the city. One of the
voices in River Voices said the best
thing about the flood was that it was “spiritual.” Another went so far as to
say the flood was the best thing that had ever happened to Portsmouth. As the chief victim of the “spiritual” flood, Tomlin has become arguably the most revered figure in the city’s history.

Real Time, Mythic Time

In her paper, Pasquinelli pointed out some facts
related to the flood that I didn’t hear voiced in River
Voices. Pasquinelli
was not trying to confirm or refute the narrative
of redemption; she was simply trying to establish the truth. As she wrote in the Acknowledgment, she was
trying, in the words of one of her favorite authors, “to absorb as much of the truth
as I could, and to tell it, as best I knew how.” The most important
episode of the redemption narrative, Tomlin’s death,
Pasquinelli
acknowledged, was a problem. “It is unclear whether Chick was able to right his own
boat or whether he had made his way to another boat,” she wrote. And what about
Tomlin’s two other children and her mother-in-law, who had been in the boat and
were presumably in the water? Like the flood water itself, at this crucial point in the narrative, things become murky. When there is uncertainty about what actually happened in
history, as there often is afterward, and not just in a crisis, myth makers step in to
reconcile inconsistencies, fill in the gaps with might-have-beens to keep the narrative
spinning, turning what was at best an ambiguous incident into a clearly defined one. It was hard to understand how Chick could have taken Alberta from her
mother in the darkness if the boat had just capsized. Had he righted the heavy sixteen-foot-long john boat, if that was
the type of rowboat it was, then he
would have had to retrieve the oars in the dark and positioned the boat to rescue the mother
and infant. In real world there does not
appear to have been enough time to do everything, and for everything to happen, but in the mythic time of art there is all the time in the world.

John
Lorentz suspects that the reason Bessie
Tomlin’s self-sacrifice had been ignored
in earlier accounts of the flood might have been because of racism. I've been told her original gravestone at the cemetery was quite small. (It has since been replaced by an imposing one.) But he does not voice that suspicion in River
Voices because racism would cast a shadow over the narrative of redemption
and reflect poorly on the people of Portsmouth, who were portrayed in River Voices as the salt of the earth. But
there is another possible reason why
Tomlin’s sacrifice had previously been
ignored. When I was a member of the Scioto County Historical Society some years
ago, I heard another account of the
Tomlin drowning from older white female members of the society, an account that I was told had originated in
the Portsmouth black community. I will
not repeat that account here, since it might have been an unfounded, possibly racist rumor that had originated in
the white, not the black community. It is a very remote possibility, and I say it quite tentatively, but it is possible that Tomlin was a victim of de facto segregation because if she was not being transferred to a de facto separate-but-equal refuge, she probably would not have drowned.

De Facto Segregation

I
gather from Pasquinelli’s paper that de facto segregation might have been one of the factors that complicated flood
relief efforts in Portsmouth. In the earliest stages of the flood, established patterns of
behavior, distinctions of class and race in particular, were tentatively suspended. The de facto
segregation of pre-flood Portsmouth was put
on hold. Even Dreamland Pool, which normally was segregated, harbored people of
color in the early stages of the flood. The residents of Hilltop were mostly white and a number of them reportedly took in refugees from the floodplain, but it is unlikely that many if
any blacks were among those who were taken in at Hilltop homes. At the beginning of the flood, before the schools
in the floodplain were inundated, both whites
and blacks took refuge in them, but as the flood spread over the floodplain,
Lincoln School on the Hilltop became the school to which
black refugees were transported. Lincoln School was the destination the boat Tomlin was in until it capsized.
There had been white refugees in the Lincoln School in the earliest stage of the flood, but the whites were moved out to make
room for blacks because Lincoln School had become a sort of separate-but-equal facility for blacks during the flood. Not appreciating being crowded into the Lincoln School, the
blacks there protested. “The protest,” Pasquinelli wrote, “was by several
hundred African Americans who were being
housed at the still-crowded Lincoln School and who did not want to be
removed from the city, fearing they would not be returned promptly after the
flood was over.” On Friday January 21, 1830, all the blacks of Portsmouth had been ordered out of the city. Whether or not they knew of Black Friday, the blacks at the Lincoln School
knew their presence in Portsmouth was not appreciated by some white residents who
would just as soon they never returned, partly because they were reproducing so
rapidly. The twenty-two-year-old Tomlin
had already given birth to three children and was very close at the time of the
flood to giving birth to a fourth. “Overcrowding on the Hilltop,” Pasquinelli
wrote, “became a significant problem.” Was part of the problem the protesting blacks
in the Lincoln School? When the blacks at the Lincoln Schooldid finally agree under pressure to be
evacuated to cities further north, the percentage of blacks who were evacuated from the city was
proportionally higher than the number of whites who were. When some of those blacksarrived in Columbus they found themselves in
segregated facilities.

In
River Voices, the Lorentzes were not just excellent videographers,
they were also excellent myth makers. The enshrinement of Bessie Tomlin helped
cover up, or at least mitigate,
Portsmouth’s racist past of which so-called Black Friday was an infamous example.
The author of A History of Scioto County (1903), Nelson W. Evans, called Black Friday a “relic of barbarism,” but
that day is no longer part of Portsmouth’s collective memory. Black Friday has
been covered up, covered up beautifully it could be said, both on the floodwall murals, where it was not
depicted, and in River
Voices, where it went unvoiced.

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About Me

Retired now, I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, hold B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Wesleyan U. (Conn.) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, where I was a Research Associate at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies and a coordinator of a committee that organized international American Studies conferences during the American Bicentennial. From 1989-2006, I taught English at Shawnee State U., in Portsmouth, Ohio, where I was active in the faculty union, the Shawnee Education Association, serving four terms as president. I also served as faculty advisor to the student gay and lesbian group. I have served also as president of the Concerned Citizens of Portmouth and Scioto County, a community action group.
My scholarly interests have focused on the American Dream: the Myth and the Realities.
I can be reached at rforr1@roadrunner.com
A selection of my poems can be found at http://xpalidosis.blogspot.com The original contents of all blogs on this site are copyrighted @.